BrightHaus Digital Marketing Agency

7 Tips for Building Links Without Creating Content

November 23, 2015

Google’s love affair with informative and useful content is well documented. In order to build a strong backlink profile, creating great content is reportedly the only method that works. While original and useful content should never be ignored, when time is short or topics are scarce, you can fall back on these 7 link building strategies.

1. Testimonials

If you’re using a product that you like, consider writing a testimonial on your site about the product. When you’ve created the testimonial, contact the company and let them know that they can put the testimonial on their site. Most companies like to show that real people are using their products and will link back to the testimonial on your site.

2. Event Link Building

Event link building is perfect for a company that is planning on hosting a local event for its customers and the general public. The idea behind this is that you reach out to newspapers, local travel sites, and event magazines and let them know that your company is planning to host an event for the public. You provide the location, date, time, name of the company, and a link back to your site. This is a great way to publicize the event you’re hosting, establish a new relationship with a valued online site, and receive an authoritative link.

3. Expired or Moved Sites

Hundreds of sites either shut down or get moved daily, which means that these sites’ backlink profiles make a great target list for outreach. The most difficult part of this process is identifying the sites that have shut down or moved. A list of appropriate sites can be found by using search strings like:

“target keyword” + rebranding

“target keyword” + out of business

Once you have your list of sites, you select one and plug in the URL into a tool like Majestic SEO or Ahrefs. These tools give you a comprehensive backlink profile for that moved domain. The next step would be to go to these links and identify the sites that make sense to get links from. Once the sites are identified, send an outreach email to the admin of those sites letting them know that they are linking to an outdated, non-existent site and that you would love to offer your site as a replacement.

4. Blog Aggregators

Blog aggregators are sites that aggregate blogs from different industries to make them easier to access for the user. In order to have your site appear on an aggregator, like AllTop, you are required to:

Submit your site.

Add special HTML code to your site to confirm that you’re the owner.

Wait for someone from the aggregator to stop by and take a look at your site.

Once your site is approved, you will have your own section in the aggregator with a dofollow link. Great return for very little work.

5. Broken Link Building

Broken link building is as old as the Internet itself. It’s simple to implement as well. By using search strings like:

“target keyword” + “resources page”

“target keyword” + “recommended sites”

You can identify the resources pages within your niche. By using Chrome’s Check My Links plugin, you can quickly find any broken links that a page has. Once you have your list of broken links, send an email with the list to the site admin and mention that your site would be a great replacement for one of those broken links. The site owner should be happy to include your link within his or her site.

6. Donations

Contributing to a donation not only makes you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside, but also gives you the opportunity to get a link from that charity. First, identify which charities list their donors on their sites (usually in the resources page). Once you have your list of charities, pick a few that you would like to donate to and ask for a link back to your site. You’re not only doing a good deed, but also helping yourself.

7. Google +

Google+ allows contextual dofollow links on your profile. In order to actually see the link as dofollow, you must be signed out of your Google+ account. With enough interaction within Google+ and direct linking to your profile, you can realistically make it a powerful link.

Do you have any suggestions for building links without content? Let us know in the comments.